LotusLive @ Lotusphere 2010

Greetings from Orlando.

Never have so many Connections passed so many Notes so Quickr(ly) in so little time.

Okay, so I’m a little stupid and a little foggy after all the real-time social networking from last evening.

It was so wonderful to see some of my own extended team here in Orlando, and to meet some real faces after long, virtual relationships.

Putting a face to the name…we really have to do this more often.

For now, I want to catch you up on Sean Poulley’s “LotusLive” keynote from this morning.

Sean reminded us LotusLive was formally launched only a year ago, at Lotusphere 2009, and that we now have some 18M customers worldwide.

The cloud is getting bigger, but the storm didn’t build up overnight.  It’s been a steady series of “drops,” including LotusLive Connections (June 2009), LotusLive iNotes (Sept 2009), LotusLive Global (Oct 2009, multiple language support)…and, well, the LotusLive team didn’t get much vacation time last year.

Now, the news is the continued expansion of IBM’s cloud computing footprint, continued partnership expansion (including Skype, UPS, and Xerox, among others), the partnership with IBM Research through LotusLive Labs, among other highlights.

Poulley explained that many customers, as well as IBM, have had to do more with less during the downturn, and the efficiency of cloud computing provides ease in increasing or decreasing user profiles while not sacrificing speed of deployment — in fact, many customers are finding cloud expansions to be much faster than on-premises solutions even as the cloud lowers their overall total cost of ownership.

That’s one way to beat the recession.

There’s also new news around IBM’s Lotus Symphony productivity suite, with version 3 expected to be released in beta in March.

For that, there’s been an overhaul of the user experience/interface, improved Microsoft Office 2007 support, VB Macro Support, and embedded document support (allowing multimedia embeds directly in your presos).

There’s also going to be autotext support for you text macro-generating wizards, as well as support for printing labels, biz cards, envelopes, and the like.

As I Tweeted from a session yesterday, it’s time to leave the Office for the Symphony!

As for me, I’m off to do some more real-time social networking, but will be providing another post later today with an update from the AM Lotus Connections session.